The Lake Garda Statement

Lake Garda from Above

This year’s Summer Symposium of The Roman Forum in Gardone Riviera, on the shores of Lake Garda (See previous reports: here and here), concluded with a strong statement on the crisis in the Church and the world, and the necessity of returning to the fulness of Catholic Social Teaching in order to meet the crisis. It calls for an end to the policy of “opening to the world,” and for an end to the “fruitless collaboration with the Church’s implacable opponents” that this opening has meant, and calls for “a recovery of the Church’s traditional teaching on the Social Reign of Christ the King.” The statement is being simultaneously published on several websites. We are pleased to publish this important document in full here on Rorate Cæli. (Printable version).

The Lake Garda
Statement

On the Ecclesial and
Civilizational Crisis

Preamble

Among the Catholic faithful the conviction grows that the
ongoing crisis in the Church and the drastic moral decline of our civilization
have entered a critical new phase which represents a turning point in the
history of the world.

In the Church, a Synod on the Family has devolved into a
battle to defend the indissolubility of marriage from an attack within, pitting
cardinal against cardinal and bishop against bishop. The Synod has produced a
midterm relatio, approved by the Pope
himself, which calls for the admission of divorced and remarried Catholics to
Holy Communion on a “case by case” basis without any renunciation of adulterous
relations, contrary to the explicit teaching of Pope John Paul II in line with
the perennial discipline of the Church.[1]
The same document speaks of “valuing” the “homosexual orientation” while
recognizing the “precious support for the life of the partners” supposedly
provided by “homosexual unions.”[2]Bishop Athanasius Schneider rightly observes
that “[t]his is the first time in Church History that such a heterodox text was
actually published as a document of an official meeting of Catholic bishops
under the guidance of a pope, even though the text only had a preliminary
character.”[3]

In Ireland, a popular referendum has legalized “gay
marriage” in that once exemplary Catholic country, while in the United States a
bare majority of the Supreme Court has imposed “gay marriage” on all fifty
states. Yet the Pope and the Vatican observe a resounding silence. At the same
time, the Vatican hosts conferences on climate change with notorious atheists
who advocate population control and “sustainable development goals” (SDGs) that
would only oppress ordinary people, including the poor, while leaving untouched
the hegemony of multinational corporations which, in fact, are working with the
United Nations to fashion a worldwide SDG regime. The Vatican itself has
endorsed a SDG calling on member nations to“ensure universal sexual and reproductive health and rights.”[4]

As the nations descend ever more rapidly into an abyss of
depravity, the Pope has issued a 185-page encyclical on an ecological crisis
that diverts attention from the catastrophic collapse of sexual morality in a
civilization ridden by divorce, contraception, and abortion. As to abortion,
the encyclical speaks of the “human embryo” in the context of “concern for the
protection of nature,” while earlier lamenting the extinction of plant and
animal species as a loss to our children and a diminution of the glory owed to
God.[5]

Echoing the belief of many Catholics, Bishop Schneider has
stated that we are in the midst of the “fourth great crisis” in Church History,
involving “a tremendous confusion over doctrine and liturgy. We have already
been in this for 50 years.”[6] In this context the Roman
Forum, founded by the late Dietrich von Hildebrand, has decided to issue this
Statement on the ecclesial and civilizational crisis, calling upon the
leadership of the Church, above all the Supreme Pontiff, to return to the path
from which much of the human element of the Church has strayed since the Second
Vatican Council. Because we believe this twin crisis is Christological, not ecological, we call in particular for a
recovery of the Church’s traditional teaching on the Social Reign of Christ the
King as the only sure remedy for the temporal and spiritual ills that now
threaten both the Church and human society.

Introduction

Only eleven years before the commencement of the Second
Vatican Council, Pope Pius XII issued a prophetic admonition. Speaking
of the long history of the Church’s members “using
every endeavor to convert their fellow citizens to the religion of Jesus Christ
and to fashion their morals according to its pattern, so as to safeguard both
religion and the state from approaching danger,” Pius XII urged a renewal of
missionary activity in the face of the rising specter of a civilizational
apostasy and its fatal consequences:

Venerable Brethren, you are well aware that
almost the whole human race is today allowing itself to be driven into two
opposing camps, for Christ or against Christ. The human race is involved today in a supreme crisis, which will issue
in its salvation by Christ, or in its dire destruction.[7]

Pius XII’s assessment, in line with that of his predecessors
in the Church’s long confrontation with the errors of modernity, was abruptly
abandoned after the Council in favor of the now prevailing “conciliar optimism”
regarding what Gaudium et spes described
as the “current trend of the world.”

Within
the Church, moreover, we have witnessed during the post-conciliar epoch what the future Pope Benedict XVI famously described
as “a continuing process of decay that has gone on largely on the basis of
appeals to the Council, and thus has discredited the Council in the eyes of
many people.”[8] An ill-defined ecumenism
promotes what Pope Pius XI called “a most grave error, by which the foundations of the Catholic faith
are completely destroyed”---meaning the idea that Christian unity no longer
requires “the return to the one true Church of Christ of
those who are separated from it”[9]­—as if membership
in the Catholic Church no longer mattered for the salvation of souls. A
perpetual process of “dialogue” replaces the Church’s forthright proclamation
of the necessity of conversion to the one true religion for both human
flourishing in this life and eternal happiness in the life to come. Along with
these developments, an unprecedented liturgical reform devised by a committee
has ended with what Cardinal Ratzinger called “the collapse of the liturgy”[10] and
later, as Pope Benedict XVI, the “banalization of the liturgy.”[11]

Although the traditional teaching is still to be found in the
Church’s official documents, in practice churchmen appear to repudiate her
divinely bestowed status as the axis
mundi, along which all earthly things are ordered to the glory of God and
the transcendent common good of eternal beatitude. This alarming tendency,
described as if it were an eminently favorable “opening to the world,” has
taken its toll on all aspects of the life of the Church, including the focus of
this Statement: Catholic social teaching on the duties of men and nations to
Christ the King and the dire consequences of failing to honor those duties in
personal, civic, and political life.

The
Authentic Social Teaching

The authentic social teaching of the Catholic
Church has constantly reminded the faithful of their divinely imposed duty to
attend to the needs of the poor according to the universal destination of
earthly goods and in obedience to Our Lord’s injunction: “Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one
of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”[12]No merely human organization has ever excelled
the Church in her care for the poor, even if this is not her primary mission on
earth. But nowhere does she enjoin upon the faithful any duty to submit the
administration of justice and charity either to an “invisible hand” or to
regulatory bureaucracies controlled by men without faith who are more often
than not oppressors of the poor under the guise of defending their rights. We see
the consequences of such submission, for example, in the grinding poverty of Latin
America, where global capitalism has callously exploited labor and “liberation
theology” has fomented violent revolution while liberating no one.

Catholic social teaching obliges us to recognize and oppose
capitalist individualist materialism as well as socialist collectivist
materialism. Both lack the proper sense of Catholic and natural order and both
have been brutally disrespectful of Christian morality and God’s earth. Globalist
capitalism, enabled by governmental privileges and protections, as well as
militant appeals to “American exceptionalism,” has gained much favor in
conservative Catholic circles. On the other hand, millenarian socialist
programs, involving such elements as “sustainable development goals,” worldwide
regulatory regimes, and intrinsically anti-Christian juridical frameworks,
including the United Nations, are now regaining favor with the aid of the
current pontiff. Both are equally destructive to a proper grasp of how to deal
with the real problems of the family, the civic order as a whole, universal
peace, and the environment. For both equally neglect the crucial context of
man’s destiny as the only creature possessed of an immortal and rational soul
in need of grace for redemption, perseverance in the avoidance of gravely evil
conduct, and the ultimate attainment of eternal beatitude---the highest good to
which all earthly activities should be ordered. Thus, as Pope Leo XIII stressed
in his landmark social encyclical Rerum
Novarum:

Life on
earth, however good and desirable in itself, is not the final purpose for which
man is created; it is only the way and the means to that
attainment of truth and that love of goodness in which the full life of the
soul consists. It is the soul which is made after the image and likeness of
God; it is in the soul that the
sovereignty resides in virtue whereof man is commanded to rule the creatures
below him and to use all the earth and the ocean for his profit and
advantage. “Fill the earth and subdue it;
and rule over the fishes of the sea, and the fowls of the air, and all living
creatures that move upon the earth.”[13]

The
Church’s True Appeal to Men of Good Will

Respecting
society’s observance of the universally applicable moral principles embodied in
Catholic social teaching, the popes before the Second Vatican Council never
wavered in their insistence that by virtue of her divine founding and universal
mission the Church has the unique capacity to establish that brotherhood among
men which is otherwise a utopian dream destined to produce dystopian outcomes.

The
Church has never ceased to issue an appeal to all men of good will who, by the
light of natural reason, seek the good and deplore the evils that assail human
society in our time. This appeal,
however, ought not to be confused with an indiscriminate collaboration with
secular leaders whose plans and sociopolitical and economic structures so often
show themselves to be inimical to the eternal values that men of good will
naturally recognize. It is, rather, an invitation to enter into the way of the
Catholic Church, where seekers of truth will find what they seek in superabundance.
This is no mere “triumphalism,” but rather a joyful recognition of the
incomparable goods, both natural and supernatural, that God bestows upon
humanity through His Church. The Church does not reject the world, but rather
seeks its perfection in grace.

As Pope
Pius XI declared in Ubi Arcano Dei (1922),
his great encyclical on “the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ,” the Holy Catholic Church is “by divine institution
the sole depository and interpreter of the ideals and teachings of Christ” and
“she alone possesses in any complete and true sense the power effectively to
combat that materialistic philosophy which has already done and, still
threatens, such tremendous harm to the home and to the state.” Accordingly, it
is the Church, and only she, that “is
able to set both public and private life on the road to righteousness by
demanding that everything and all men become obedient to God…”[14]

As Pope Pius X declared, concerning misguided efforts to
entangle the Church in worldly undertakings for the promotion of a universal
brotherhood, if “the highest possible peak of well being for society and its members
is to be attained through fraternity or, as it is also called, universal
solidarity, all minds must be united in the knowledge of Truth, all wills
united in morality, and all hearts in the love of God and His Son Jesus Christ.
But this union is attainable only by Catholic charity, and that is why Catholic
charity alone can lead the people in the march of progress towards the ideal
civilization.”[15]

Today, however, the Church’s leaders present her role as
merely that of proposing a “contribution” to a vast and quite hopeless
neo-Pelagian project in which the United Nations or some other “world political
authority” would serve as the juridical framework for a solidaristic world
order in which “believers,” regardless of religion, and unbelievers would be
co-equal participants. This project is directed, not upward toward Heaven for
the salvation of souls, but forward in history toward a godless, hopeless, and
painfully trite City of Man falsely lauded as a “civilization of love” or a
“renewal of humanity.”

But the truth is that the Catholic Church, which is the
Mystical Body of Christ, is the
renewal of humanity, a renewal made possible only by the translation of fallen
men into the state of sanctifying grace and the consequent elevation of human
society to heights it could never attain by any purely human effort. Thus it is
the world that is obliged to contribute to the work of the Church. Yet we witness with amazement a historically
sudden inversion of the proper order of things in the Church’s approach to her
mission in human society.

Whither the Social Kingship of Christ?

With all
of these considerations in view, we must ask: What has happened to the Church’s
certitude concerning her exclusive and divinely ordained role in the right
ordering of human affairs and the fostering of true brotherhood among men? Have
the Church’s leaders forgotten that her founder is God Incarnate? Have they
somehow misplaced the divine commission to “make disciples of all nations”?[16] Do they still believe the
defined dogma that the Church is the sole ark of salvation? Are they still
mindful of Our Lord’s warning: “without me you can do nothing”?[17]Do they no longer have confidence in His
promise: “But seek ye first the Kingdom of God, and His justice, and all these
things will be added unto you”?[18]

If the
worldwide breakdown in social order could in any respect be characterized as an
ecological crisis, how could it be anything but a manifestation of a deeper Christological crisis­—a universal
mutiny against Christ and the Law of the Gospel lamented by pope after pope
before the emergence of the inexplicable conciliar optimism? In a return to the
sober realism of his predecessors­, who are now belittled as “prophets of
doom,” Pope Benedict warned in an address to the clergy of Rome, less than two
years before the abrupt end of his pontificate, that the “fundamental consensus derived from the Christian
heritage” has been lost, the “place of moral reasoning… is taken by an
instrumental rationality,” “the most elementary rules of humanity collapse” and
with the consequent “eclipse of reason… [t]he
very future of the world is at stake.”[19]

The fate
of the world in every epoch since the Incarnation has been bound up with the
state of the Church. The Church’s power to renew the face of the earth­
involves not only a restoration of faith, hope and charity in the souls of men,
but also the defense of natural reason against the onslaughts of sophists in
every age. She alone has upheld the correct synthesis of fides et ratio.[20]The Church’s success in accomplishing this mighty work throughout
history has always depended upon her vigor in advancing what she calls the
Social Kingship of Christ. But it is precisely Christ’s social reign that the
“modern world” has rejected, while churchmen fall silent regarding the claims
of Christ the King on men and nations. Today, she not only retreats from any
confrontation with “the rulers of the world of this darkness” and
“the spirits of wickedness in the high places,”[21]
but seeks obsessively to dialogue and collaborate with the very forces that
desire nothing more ardently than the Church’s final surrender to the spirit of
the age.

And yet the truth remains. As Pius X insisted at the turn
of the 20th century: “Society cannot be set up
unless the Church lays the foundations and supervises the work; no,
civilization is not something yet to be found, nor is the New City to be built
on hazy notions; it has been in existence and still is: it is Christian
civilization, it is the Catholic City. It has only to be set up and restored
continually against the unremitting attacks of insane dreamers, rebels and
miscreants. OMNIA INSTAURARE IN CHRISTO.”[22]

In remarkable
contrast, the prevailing mentality that is at the root of the ecclesial crisis
considers the conviction of this sainted Pope to be nothing other than an
idyllic fantasy---even though it reflects the form and pattern nurturing and
guiding our entire Christian civilization.Lost on the exponents of this facile rejection of the Social Kingship
doctrine is the irony of their own ideological pursuit of what Pius X called “a
mere verbal and chimerical construction in which we shall see, glowing in a
jumble, and in seductive confusion, the words Liberty, Justice, Fraternity,
Love, Equality, and human exultation, all resting upon an ill-understood human
dignity” and producing, were it ever to be realized, “a Democracy which will be
neither Catholic, nor Protestant, nor Jewish. It will be a religion… more
universal than the Catholic Church, uniting all men [as] brothers and comrades
at last in the ‘Kingdom of God’….”[23]

Conclusion

The
conversion of nations to Christ and trust in Divine Providence are the twin
pillars of any truly just society. Yet, after fifty years of an imaginary
ecclesial “renewal,” the generality of the Church’s leaders appear to have repudiated
in practice the duty to seek the conversion of nations, as if they believed
that social metanoia were now impossible even for God. Behind this loss of militancy
is a dimming of the Faith itself. In his
masterwork on the post-conciliar crisis, Iota
Unum, the great Romano Amerio observed that “Faith in Providence thus proclaims
the possibility that the world might rise and be healed by a metanoia which it
cannot initiate but which it is capable of accepting once it is offered.”[24] That
offer must come from the Church, as it has in every age when the collapse of
civilization was reversed in miraculous fashion under her supernatural
influence.

The ecclesial crisis and the intimately related
civilizational crisis will end only when the Church’s offer of social metanoia
is renewed once again. But only the Vicar of Christ can effectively extend that
offer to the world. Only he can end what
amounts to an unprecedented de facto suspension of the Church’s true mission in
the name of a Council whose restless “spirit,” moving far beyond even the
problematical conciliar texts, has produced what Benedict XVI, speaking just days
before his mysterious abdication of the papacy, described as “so many
disasters, so many problems, so much suffering” in the Church.[25]

Therefore, we implore the reigning Roman Pontiff to reverse the
Church’s course of the past fifty years, abandoning a disastrous “opening to
the world” and an endless “dialogue” and fruitless collaboration with the
Church’s implacable opponents. With respect to the Synod, we urgently petition
the Pope to put a stop to all further efforts to use the synodal process to
undermine the indissolubility of marriage—and thus the entire moral edifice of
the Church—by means of a sophistical disjunction between doctrine and practice,
making a mockery not only of the words of Our Lord Himself but also of the
teaching of John Paul II that “only by the acceptance of the Gospel are the
hopes that man legitimately places in marriage and in the family capable of
being fulfilled.” [26]

And finally, we beseech the Roman Pontiff to fulfill his duty
as Vicar of Christ and Universal Shepherd by leading the way to a restoration
of the continuity between the Church’s venerable teaching on the Social
Kingship of Christ—never repealed—and the practice of churchmen both high and
low. This is in accord with the new Catechism of the Catholic Church, which
recalls the sacred obligation of Catholics to evangelize their fellow citizens
and work for the transformation of social order in keeping with Christ’s
kingship:

By constantly evangelizing men, the Church works
toward enabling them “to infuse the Christian spirit into the mentality and mores, laws and structures of the communities in
which [they] live. The social duty of Christians is to respect and awaken
in each man the love of the true and the good. It requires them to make known
the worship of the one true religion
which subsists in the Catholic and apostolic Church. Christians are called
to be the light of the world. Thus, the Church shows forth the kingship of Christ over all creation and in particular over human societies.[27]

For these intentions, we make our own the Lord’s prayer for
the first Pope, which surely also applies to every one of his successors,
especially in this age of unparalleled diabolical disorientation: “And the Lord
said: Simon, Simon, behold Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you
as wheat: But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith fail not: and thou, being once converted, confirm
thy brethren.”[28]